Electron beam freeform fabrication or EBF3 is an emerging manufacturing deposition process in which an electron beam is used in conjunction with a wire feed in order to progressively build material on a substrate in a layered manner. The electron beam is translated with respect to a surface of the substrate while the wire is melted and fed into a molten pool. In an EBF3 process, a design drawing of a three-dimensional (3D) object may be sliced into different layers as a preparatory step, with the electron beam tracing each of the various layers within a relatively high-vacuum environment. The layers cool into a desired complex or 3D shape.
Conventional electron beam control methodologies may be less than optimal for certain purposes, such as for maintaining an even or consistent material deposition height. In addition, manual controls are often used to retain the wire feedstock as it is fed into and captured in the beam and the molten pool. Perturbations may cause the wire to stray from the beam path and/or the molten pool, potentially causing transient instability and discontinuities in the deposited material. Moreover, convention deposition control processes perform a single process at a time, modulating the electron beam between processing steps for serial application of different techniques. With the development of EBF3, control processing complexity has increased dramatically.